Traces
A trace is nothing more than a whisper. A suggestion. A probability. Perhaps, a shadow. But it is not the thing it marks. That thing, if it ever truly existed, occupies another world.
Yet, and so, traces become the thing itself, a replacement for something lost. This is the story of archaeology, history, anthropology, and all such efforts to recreate and explain worlds contained only in vestigial artefacts. All of this is profoundly complicated with the introduction of language, itself a trace of mental processes yearning for revelation and expression.
When done well, as perfectly as all communication is imperfect, these traces work as invitations. Minds and worlds open. The hermetic gift is communion.
These small collections of words, fused with one of humanity’s most stable and persistent technologies, offers a way to think about what happens when those traces become even more real than the world they evoke.
Together, they have provided a partial foundation for my own understanding and appreciation of this world. Their clarity and meaning—sometimes, as here, obscured and murky—offer lasting hope.
List of authors and their words
Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
-Jean Baudrillard
Hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on the window.
-Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul
Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.
-Claude Levy-Strauss
Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me.
-Seferis
This dewdrop world
is a dewdrop world
and yet and yet…
-Issa
Man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all the plaything of his memory.
-Andre Breton
Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind.
-Tommaso Marinetti
And you, you who can be silent in four languages. Your silence will be considered your consent.
-Laurie Anderson
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
-Guy Debord
Singing alone in a bamboo grove
Plucking a lute, whistling along
Deep in the woods
Where I cannot be found
The bright moon shines on me.
-Wang Wei
There was something about word forever that they could taste. They could smell it in the smoke trailing from the fireplaces of the new suburban homes built at the edges of the world…the fading memory of the heft of a single elk.
-BK Loren
There are a thousand, thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
-Marilynne Robinson
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
no sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, nor object of mind;
no realm of sight, no realm of consciousness;
no ignorance, no end to ignorance;
no old age and death,
no cessation of old age and death;
no suffering, nor cause or end to suffering;
no path, no wisdom and no gain.
No gain – thus Boddhisattvas live this Prajna Paramita
with no hindrance of mind–
no hindrance therefore no fear.
Far beyond all delusion, Nirvana is already here.
-The Heart Sutra